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The Commuter’s City

By Mary Beth Keane July 5, 2012 12:30 pmJuly 5, 2012 12:30 pm

Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.

One afternoon several months ago, I was sitting on the curb watching my 4-year-old son ride his bicycle when I noticed he put up his hand every time he passed a particular telephone pole. He slowed as he approached the pole, extended his arm straight out, his palm out like he was signaling someone to stop, and then sped up once he was safely past.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Going through the toll,” he said.

Until recently, I’d been too lazy to mount my E-ZPass in our new car, and I realized he was mimicking what I did whenever we crossed the toll plaza to the George Washington Bridge: grab the pass from the glove compartment and hold it out the window, hoping the invisible eye had registered our payment.

When we were kids, my sisters and I played Port Authority. The game involved a lot of rushing up and down the stairs inside our house, to and from the Red and Tan bus represented by the basement couch. There was no drama except for the rushing and the fighting for a spot on the cushions (the driver sat on the arm). Like my son’s, it was a game that only a kid living in a suburb of New York City would invent.

In the Rockland County town I grew up in, most every kid had at least one parent who commuted to the city. When we played running bases outside, it was not uncommon for someone’s mother or father to call out to us — 8 and 9 year olds, trying to postpone homework — that there was heavy traffic on the F.D.R. so we could play for another half-hour before going home for supper.

My sisters and I had no idea what our parents did, exactly, when they went to work in the city. It was the getting there that interested us, and the city itself — the exotic, vibrant backdrop of whatever vague tasks kept them away from us all day. My mother, who spent weekends in her Dr. Scholl’s, wore stockings and high heels when Monday rolled around and it was time to catch the bus. My father, who was a New York City tunnel worker for 30 years, car-pooled to work with other sandhogs on his shift. On weekends, when my sisters and I were assigned the chore of cleaning out the car, we would find a week’s worth of empty coffee cups, gas station receipts, Lotto tickets.

We begged to visit the city, and my parents complied, bringing us to see the tree in Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. When I was 16 my mother got a new weekend job caring for an elderly woman who lived in a hotel on Central Park South, and as the buses ran infrequently on Sundays, my father would usually let me drive when we went to pick her up. He’d snore in the passenger seat while I, a sophomore in high school, sailed down the West Side Highway, navigated the one-way streets, double-parked.

I knew that the city was for me, and I was determined to understand it from the inside, to be versed in more than the Port Authority and Penn Station, the various bridges and tunnels. So when the time came I went to Barnard College, where in my senior year I was assigned a dorm room so spacious, and a view of the glittering Hudson so impressive, that I spent my entire year there setting myself up for the shock and disappointment of the postgrad renter’s life.

Anton Van Hertbruggen

For several years after college, a friend and I shared a tiny apartment in Yorkville that had a shower in the kitchen, a tiny bathroom off the closet that we used as a bedroom and no bathroom sink. Our apartment was crawling with roaches; when the roaches disappeared, we celebrated until we realized we should have been bracing ourselves for mice. I was dead broke. Still, I loved New York. My boyfriend (now my husband) and I spent hours walking around different neighborhoods, looking through windows of stores, sitting in parks, trying to imagine what city life was like from every point of view. I was just beginning to feel like a New Yorker.

But then it was time to leave. I’d gotten accepted to graduate school at the University of Virginia. Most people encouraged me to go. It’s cheaper in other places, easier to live, and so on. It would be only two years, I figured. A brief trip to another part of America, and then in a blink I’d be back home, once again spending my Saturday mornings hunting for a quiet place to write. Only one friend warned: if you leave New York now it will be too hard to come back. “Why?” I remember asking. That just couldn’t be true. If anything, a few years away would give me a chance to get on my feet, get a better hold on my career, get my priorities straight.

But in my case, she was right. My husband and I lived in Charlottesville for four years — he did his own two-year program after I finished mine — and then moved to Philadelphia for four more. In both places, we paid almost nothing (in New York terms) for a two-bedroom apartment. A girl gets used to certain luxuries — a dishwasher, a proper bedroom, a bathroom with a sink. After nearly eight years away from New York, growing more spoiled by the year, and with a son to consider and a second on the way, my husband was considering a job in yet another state, and I realized we had to decide right then. We go back now or we go back never. So we acted.

“You’re coming back!” our friends in Brooklyn and Manhattan said when we announced our impending return. They qualified that excitement when I told them where exactly we’d decided to live. Not in Cobble Hill or the Upper West Side, but in Pearl River, in the house directly next door to the one I grew up in, where my parents still live.

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Like most teenagers, I thought one day I’d leave my hometown behind forever. Like most adults, I realize now that many of the things I thought as a teenager were idiotic. Still, it was a difficult choice. My morning runs take the very same routes they did in high school. My mom reminds me to tidy up my sons’ toys when she notices them scattered across the yard in the same tone she used when she’d ask me to clean my room. The house we live in was built in the same year as my parents’ house and has the exact same layout. At first, when I woke up in the middle of the night, I’d find myself confused, in a dream of adolescence, except with wood floors, different curtains.

In the end, though, mine was a happy adolescence, a happy childhood. We could have tried to create the same thing for our boys, of course, in the city or another state entirely. But we thought, Why not try here?

Most days in Pearl River are quiet and still. Now that it’s summer, I see clearly why we chose suburban life: half a dozen bicycles abandoned on our lawn as the neighborhood kids run around before dinner. But like me, my sons are being raised by parents who commute to and from Manhattan. They stack their blocks on the kitchen floor and say they are building skyscrapers. Watching them, I wonder what claim they’ll make on the city. They will be travelers to the city, not sons of it. New York will be their point of orientation, but as often as they go to the city, they will also go away from it.

I’ll try to take them there as often as possible, to see up close the variety, the energy and the sometimes overwhelming difficulties of city life. For now though, I’m happy if they see only the possibilities, that view from midspan on the George Washington Bridge, that point when we glance to the right and all of Manhattan is rolled out before us. This is New York’s gift to the commuter.

What's Next

Townies, a series about life in New York — and occasionally other cities — written by the novelists, journalists and essayists who live there, appears on Thursdays. This week features an essay by Sandy SooHoo, a freelance photographer and writer who is working on a collection of essays.